1. Field of the Description
The present description relates, in general, to providing services in an efficient and well-managed manner via a network such as within or via a datacenter, and, more particularly, to methods and systems for providing a self-configuring content switch such as within a switch or access point to a pull-based computer system (e.g., a datacenter) used to provide services to clients.
2. Relevant Background
Datacenters are evolving into a more automated network-centric model, which may be applied to both public and private cloud computing. Networking, platform, storage, and software infrastructure may be provided as services that scale up or down upon demand. The network-centric model allows the datacenter to be viewed as a collection of automatically deployed and managed application services that utilize the underlying and virtualized services and/or computer resources.
Within existing datacenters and other service networks, it has proven difficult to synchronize the network equipment including high volumes of virtualized applications. Additionally, there are demands for methods and systems for providing services that are more scalable to meet growing or changing needs of clients in a network and to balance loads as services are accessed and deployed in a dynamic manner. Stated differently, there is an ongoing demand for ways of providing sufficient elasticity and scalability in a secure fashion for the rapidly growing needs of a datacenter, and such ways or methods typically may have to provide automatically managed services that can scale efficiently and without limits so as to let services adapt easily to changing requirements and workloads.
The present or typical datacenter may fail to meet all of these needs or demands. For example, a typical enterprise system for services may be built upon the push model for providing services. This may involve configurations for services being pushed out from a central server or centralized provider of services out to one or more servers that then act to provide the service and handle relationships including ingress and egress (which may involve a template providing a fixed set of relationships or a model the provides dynamic relationships). Such a push model may not support ready scaling to suit changing demands and is susceptible to failure, e.g., a centralized service manager may go down or become unavailable terminating access to a number of services. As will be understood by those skilled in the art, the traditional approach to automation of the management of services is to implement centralized provisioning systems that deploy individual services onto target systems. This approach limits scalability since regardless of the size of the centralized system there is always a limit to its capacity and throughput. The centralized system can break if there is a demand peak for its services that outstrips its capacity.